paclink-unix Use Cases

Description of using paclink-unix that all use different mail clients but the transport mechanism is the same. All Winlink mail clients have the same 2 step operation. On the send side you compose a message and deposit it to a directory then you invoke a transport mechanism to send messages. For paclink-unix the transport mechanisms are telnet (wl2ktelnet) for sending over the Internet, radio (wlk2kax25) for sending via a TNC to your radio & serial (wl2kserial) for sending via a Pactor modem to your radio. The receive process is just the reverse, invoke the transport mechanism then view your messages.

I run a number of RMS Gateways & I would like to know if they are up & working on a daily basis. Once a day around midnight a cron job runs a script that parses the RMS Gateway log file and pulls out the call signs of everyone that successfully connected to that gateway. The script takes that information and Winlink mails it to my SMTP e-mail address.

For this case, since I am using a script, everything runs from a command line. Linux offers a number of choices of composing e-mail via the command line ie. Mail & Mutt.

• Examples using mutt_and_mail in scripts or command line.

I am at my workstation & I need to send a message out to the group. In this case I have a choice of e-mail clients but they have a requirement of being able to handle Unix movemail. Mozilla_Thunderbird, dtmail, the webmail client Neomail and console based clients pine, elm & NeoMutt all satisfy that requirement. In this case you can use any mail client that supports movemail to compose & receive messages, the transport mechanism remains the same.

I am in the living room controlling my MythTV box with my Android pad and I want to use a mail client on that pad to send a winlink mail message. In this case the mail client does not support movemail but it does support IMAP or POP3. You need to install & configure a Mail Transfer Agent or “mail server” on the same machine that hosts AX.25 and paclink-unix. I use the Android K-9 mail program to compose the messge on my pad and a very simple web app to invoke either wl2ktelnet, wl2kax25 or wl2kserial on the remote machine. The way I have this set up I could be in my living room or in a hotel room in another city.